The Evidence Against You

by Gillian McAllister

  You will pay, I sent to her, a text which was later picked over, examined, misconstrued in court.

  Izzy

  It was easy, in the end, to have Pip over. Television had led Izzy to believe that they would need pebbles to throw at windows, ladders. Telegrams, Pip had joked. But they hadn’t. ‘Fine,’ her mother had said when Izzy had floated the idea. Izzy had been leaning on the front counter of the restaurant. That was it: fine. Fine to have Pip over. Her mother had exchanged a glance with one of the regulars, Marcus with the white-blond hair, who always ate right there at the bar. Izzy had looked at him. ‘Teenage romances,’ he’d said, and her mother had busied herself at the till.

  ‘So this is your humble abode,’ Pip said. She’d never once had a boy in her bedroom, and he looked out of place standing there in his Converse trainers.

  He gravitated to her wall of framed black-and-white photographs.

  ‘All the ballet,’ he said, running a finger over one. ‘Which one is it you’re getting into?’

  ‘Steady,’ she said. ‘I’m not in yet. Don’t jinx it.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said simply. ‘But I’m sure you will. What’ll they make you do?’

  ‘Make me do?’ she echoed.

  ‘The bleeding toes and the sit-ups …’ he held up his hands. ‘My knowledge comes from shit dance films. Sorry.’

  ‘Who watches those?’

  ‘Steve, of course,’ Pip says with a smile. His stepfather always protested at the romcoms, but watched them avidly. ‘He’s enthralled, look at him,’ Pip had said drily last weekend. ‘He only wishes he could bump into Julia Roberts in a Notting Hill bookshop.’

  Izzy always thought she’d want a boyfriend she had lots in common with; someone whose interests aligned with hers, to whom she never had to explain anything. But here was Pip, a strange man – blond, lanky, interested in literature when she couldn’t bear the over-analysis, relaxed where she was energetic – and she was fascinated, absolutely fascinated by him. By the way he believed in fate – ‘total bollocks,’ Izzy had laughed, and he had joined in. And the way he sent her a daily poem every morning. Maya Angelou, Lord Byron, Philip Larkin. All tapped out by him, to her. Love letters, spanning multiple messages that each cost him ten pence. The way he never knew what he’d be doing the next day, how he often ‘popped over’ to the mainland on the ferry, not letting the Isle of Wight cut him off from life.

  And so she didn’t mind explaining ballet basics to him. He didn’t need to be familiar to her: he didn’t need to be like her. ‘There are three long classes a day. A nutritional plan. Yes, some sit-ups,’ she said.

  ‘Five days a week?’

  ‘Six. And I would still do a quick barre on the seventh day. And the rest: darning pointe shoes, breaking the shank – the back – so they show off your arch better. Soaking them in calamine lotion to make them a lovely matte pink, to make the line of your leg to your toes look better.’

  ‘Ballet admin.’ He turned to face her. His expression was unreadable. His raspberry-red lips were drawn together, his dark blue eyes carefully watching her. He bit his lip. ‘Well, we did it,’ he said. ‘We’re alone.’

  She spread her arms wide. This was it. All of the texts and the calls and the what was the best day of your life; what’s your biggest regret? questions. They had all culminated in this moment: they were finally alone in the way they had been imagining.

  Pip didn’t make it weird, and that’s what she liked best about him. Instead, he flopped down on to the lilac beanbag next to her bed and crossed his long legs out in front of him.

  ‘You should get away, before you go to the military ballet school,’ he said. He had been everywhere. Four holidays a year. The hallway in his house was covered in photographs from each trip. Him, Ollie, their parents. Last year they’d been to Thailand for the entire summer holiday. Pip saw himself equivalent to Izzy, she was sure of that, but they weren’t. Steve would spend £200 in Sainsbury’s, proffer posh chocolates in a box on a regular Saturday night. Izzy’s parents spent £20 in Kwik Save, and argued about it.

  ‘Will you go away?’ she said.

  ‘We should.’

  Her heart opened. ‘Before your literature degree,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Before that. Before you join the ballet Nazis.’

  ‘They’re not Nazis,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘Those feet have been tortured,’ he said, pointing.

  She was standing, barefoot, feet turned out, as she often did. Bunions, blisters, over-defined muscles. Her feet looked scary out of their elegant pointe shoes, she had to admit.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere you like … you can show me pirouettes in Paris. An arabesque in Australia. Wherever.’

  ‘Why English literature?’ she said, still standing by the photographs.

  ‘I think it’s the way to wisdom,’ Pip said in that easy way of his. He leant back, fully stretching out like a cat on her beanbag. Even in here, in her slightly too-cold bedroom, his cheeks were pink. He had just the faintest trace of blond stubble across his jaw. As he leant backwards, she saw a trail of dark stomach hair, which she stared at. ‘Besides, writers are hilarious. The shenanigans Lord Byron got up to …’

  He put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. ‘You coming over, anyway, English?’ he said. He opened one eye and looked at her. And, just like that, she went to join him on the beanbag. His left arm enfolded her, around her waist, feeling both as safe as home and as dangerous as fire. The warmth of him. The solidity. The soft cotton of his T-shirt when she tentatively rested her hand on his stomach.

  ‘Well now …’ she said.

  At first he said nothing back, only a deep, thoughtful mmm. Then, ‘These abs,’ he said, his arm around her waist gripping her tightly. ‘How many Saturday sit-ups do you do, again?’

  ‘One thousand,’ she said.

  ‘Shame about the feet,’ he said.

  Izzy lifted a leg elegantly into the air and waved her ugly foot at him.

  ‘Like a hag’s,’ he said, and she giggled into his shoulder. ‘It looks like it’s been cursed.’

  ‘That’s the English student in you,’ she said. ‘Always looking for a story.’

  They lay like that for over an hour before the shouting started.

  ‘It’s Mum on the phone to Dad,’ she said softly to him as they listened. Her mother had screeched what? already.

  ‘Well, at least a domestic might provide a good distraction for me to sneak out,’ he said. His voice was intimate by her ear. Only a murmur, really. ‘No need to do the meet and greets.’

  ‘True,’ she said.

  More shouting. We needed it, she thought her mother was saying. And then: no, don’t.

  She couldn’t make out any more words. She felt her cheeks heat up, regardless. Couldn’t they control themselves?

  They stood and she led Pip out of her room. On the landing, she heard her mother again. ‘Shit,’ she was saying to herself. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  ‘Oh dear, definitely time for me to go,’ Pip whispered. ‘You should’ve heard mine the other week. Mum went nuclear.’

  It had put a dampener on the evening, and not even driving could cheer Izzy up. She drove them to Godshill in silence. As they sat outside his town house, the engine idling, Izzy could hear the train line in the distance, and the traffic outside the front of the house. There was a takeaway opposite them that Pip said he sometimes got a naan bread from, to go with Steve’s home-made curry, and a music shop next to it that sold guitars and drum kits. It was the opposite of Izzy’s suburban seaside house that always smelt slightly salty.

  She waited.

  Pip seemed to be stalling.

  In the end, he kissed her properly.

  21

  ‘I had forgotten how much you had started to row,’ she says nervously now to Gabe.

  He produces a pack of cards and starts shuffling them aimlessly. ‘We played so many card games inside,’ he says, nodding to them. ‘Great
way to pass the time.’

  ‘You preferred to play sport at home. Tennis. Badminton.’

  ‘I know. I have come around to the sedentary life,’ he says. He starts dealing. ‘Here, I’ll teach you.’

  ‘I had thought you were happy,’ Izzy says, steadfastly leading him to what she wants to discuss.

  ‘We were.’

  ‘But these rows, they’re making me remember all sorts of stuff … I wish they weren’t.’

  He shrugs at that, saying nothing. He has dealt them two cards each. ‘Pontoon?’ he says. They only ever played cards on holiday. The tap, tap, tap of rain on French campsites as they played on the wooden decking, sheltered under the porch.

  He doesn’t mention the rows with her mother again, and she doesn’t press. But, as she’s leaving, she produces the receipt, scrunched up in her handbag. ‘I found this,’ she says. ‘I was thinking about what you said, that Mum threw a glass at you … about her temper.’

  Gabe takes the receipt, turning it over in his hands. He studies the handwriting, then looks back up at her. ‘Yes, she wrote me this,’ he says softly.

  Izzy swallows. Her mother’s and father’s handwriting was similar, but not quite the same, and this is his. He’s lying to her.

  She leaves quickly, looking over her shoulder as she does so. She’s a fool. She won’t be a fool again. She won’t. She’ll go home and ignore him, from now on.

  As she stops in traffic, she sees two men standing in the doorway of a shut-up tourist shop, yet to open for the season. They’re performing a transaction of some kind, money in exchange for a small parcel, and Izzy looks away, away from the seedy underbelly of the island that Nick so often refers to.

  And then she thinks again of the receipt, her father’s lies about the handwriting. She thinks, too, of the wardrobe he claimed her mother bought. But another memory pops into her mind. Him lifting it over the threshold of the house on a borrowed trolley. No. Can that be true? She can picture it perfectly, the curled ornate edges, the wrought-iron handles. She is sure he was wheeling it in, ready to present it to her mother.

  And her mother had said ‘no, don’t’ on the phone to her father. It was missing from Gabe’s account, but Izzy was sure she had heard it. She remembers so clearly because she had a witness. They had exchanged a glance. He was somebody she trusted, somebody she had loved very much, who was with her, alone, for the very first time, who heard it too. He was someone who later stopped loving her.

  What’s the truth? The discrepancies between her and Gabe’s accounts and memories of the events leading up to her mother’s death are growing in small but significant ways, like the beginnings of a fault line in the earth itself. His incorrect recall about who had painted the restaurant cellar. The way his arguments with her mother are tweaked in his favour. It might be misremembering, but it serves Gabe. It always advantages him. It’s hard not to be suspicious.

  She will go home and, soon, she will read about it, she decides. Properly. Swallow the nausea and read the full accounts of his trial online. The evidence. It is not only that she wants to exonerate him, it is that she wants to free herself of that past.

  Of his temper, and what might live within her.

  Izzy opens her laptop first thing the next day, as soon as Nick has left for work. He had kissed her goodbye, an unusually full, warm kiss that reminded her of the weekend they met, all that time spent in his tent, laughing at this clever, steady man who’d suddenly become the centre of her life.

  She forgets the kiss as she opens Facebook. Somebody has given Alexandra’s a five-star review. Despite its morbid roots … the review begins, and she clicks off it. She sets her coffee down on the kitchen table.

  Gabriel is easy to find on the internet. The Post ran a full feature in 1999 – GABRIEL ENGLISH: ARTIST AND KILLER. And she’s read The Island Echo’s story before – RESTAURANT OWNER WIFE MURDERED BY HUSBAND, SURVIVING DAUGHTER TO TESTIFY. Today, she wants something more. She is looking for something outside of herself and her memories. Her own recollections are tangled and incoherent, muddied by the lens through which she views them. She is a melting pot of childhood memories, her grandparents’ views, press headlines next to normal family photographs deemed sinister with hindsight … She cannot remember what is real.

  She is looking for the daily coverage of the trial. All of the evidence, all of the conjecture, all of the arguments. The professionals’ views, that is what she wants. Not opinions. But facts. If she reads enough of them, perhaps she can begin to form her own opinion, like taking a handful of different ingredients and making a cake. She can’t believe she is here, that she actively wants to read about the things she has avoided for so long.

  She types Gabriel English into the British Newspaper Archive. It is somehow removed from her father’s name, in the way a celebrity’s may be. Gabriel English is a notorious killer, the subject of tabloid spreads and true-crime documentaries. But her father – her living, breathing, soft-bodied father – is somebody who used to like to lick his finger and pick up the tiny splinters of crisps left at the bottom of the bag, somebody who believed in fresh air and long runs, somebody who took seriously the thoughts running through Izzy’s mind, and listened to them.

  She scrolls down to 1999 in the local press section. The stories begin there, running into 2000, a new one at least every week until the trial was over, then her father’s appeal failed and the press moved on. She looks at the most recent articles.

  Notorious wife-killer Gabriel English’s daughter reopens restaurant in mother’s name.

  Alexandra’s opening – Izzy English – her mother’s image.

  Izzy remembers the night she opened the restaurant. She was just twenty-one. The money had come from her grandparents, though everybody had assumed otherwise. When you are beset by tragedy, everybody assumes that at least you get a pot of money. Life insurance payouts. Compensation. But she didn’t: there was nothing.

  She had wanted to open the restaurant without ceremony. Switch the lights on and open the doors one night and see who came by. But her business head had taken over: she needed the press on side. And, of course, they came because of who she was. She avoided the questions, the awkward enquiries, but later that night, when she’d had a couple of flutes of what everybody thought was champagne but was actually Lambrini, somebody referenced her history. She was standing near to the bar, taking it all in, when a man with a DSLR camera slung around his neck came up to her and said, very simply, ‘What is it like?’ His eyes were round and staring as she met them and she saw in them not a journalistic curiosity but a human one. She was other. She didn’t answer him, just picked up her glass and moved along the bar, but she hadn’t forgotten the question. She could never answer it. It would take all year.

  After everybody had left, she ran her palm along the bar. She knew she didn’t feel how she ought to. There wasn’t pride, or accomplishment, or even happiness, really. Instead, she felt the familiar feeling of displacement. I’m not supposed to be here. Her mother dead, her father incarcerated, and running a restaurant by herself. It’s not where she wanted to be. And so, for two minutes, she let herself transform. The bar became a barre. She assembled her feet into first position and did a few experimental pliés. But she couldn’t continue. She was choked up. Her body was stiff, her memories brittle. She couldn’t access her self: her old self. The one who had danced so freely. Before.

  She scrolls now to the articles written during her father’s trial.

  Missing Alexandra English’s body found – husband arrested at scene.

  Alexandra English: cause of death confirmed.

  Alexandra English made phone call plea moments before death.

  Izzy feels sick, and clicks off the browser and back to Facebook. It blinks with a new message. Alice Reid has written back.

  Hi Izzy, and thanks for writing to me.

  I do remember you and your father but I’m afraid I can only remember what I said at the trial. I dropped your mother off at
about quarter to midnight. She paid me in cash, got out of the taxi, and in the rear-view mirror I saw her enter the house.

  I hope this helps you, Izzy, to perhaps get some peace. I’d rather move on, myself, and enjoy life. And so I’d ask that you don’t write again.

  Izzy reads her words over and over. In the rear-view mirror I saw her enter the house. As she had told the court, she guesses. But could she be sure? In Izzy’s and Gabe’s recollections there are inconsistencies. Things presumed. How many taxi journeys did Alice make every day? Did she always see her clients enter their destination, or did she just presume – imagine it, construct it around what she expected? What if Izzy went there? Parked up outside? Saw what a taxi driver could see?

  ‘She didn’t know,’ her grandmother had said at home one night during the trial, to her grandfather, while Izzy sat on the spot on the landing where the pipes crossed and warmed the carpet. ‘She didn’t know she was going home to be murdered.’

  22

  Izzy watches the dishes moving around the restaurant. She is not thinking, not doing anything, just aimless. She’s remembering her mother, standing here in this exact spot a few days before she died. Black trousers, white shirt, red hair, just like her. What would she think of Izzy? Perhaps she’d be willing her not to see Gabe again: her killer. Or she’d be wishing Izzy would hear him out. And what about that? Who would she want Izzy to be careful of? The real killer?

  Izzy lets that thought turn over in her mind for a few minutes. The real killer. Not her father. She thinks of her middle-class mother, the restaurant owner, her daughter off to ballet school, her husband an artist. Who would want to kill her?

  ‘Alright?’ Tony says to her, walking into Alexandra’s and hanging up his jacket. He’s come to work the bar. ‘I don’t even know why I brought that,’ he says, gesturing to his coat. ‘Sweltering out there. The oysters will be nice tonight, though. I can always smell it in the air when there’s been a good catch.’